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Monthly Archives: March 2012

I’m going to Japan tomorrow to visit my brother and in honor of that I’m sharing my favorite Japanese YouTuber: Megwin. He does a painful/dangerous physical challenges and funny sketches. I mostly watch him abuse himself. Pratfalls are the universal language of comedy.

So your friend asks you to take care of his dog for a weekend. Obviously your first thought should be to fashion a camera rig from a old shin guard and a go-pro, shoot a day’s worth of footage of your adventures around Cape Town, and then set it to a Johnny Neon soundtrack, right?

Holi, aka the Festival of Colors, is a traditional Indian holiday. But in South Folk, Utah crowds celebrate the holiday in our own innovative fashion, by throwing PAINT DUST at each other until they are completely covered in NEON!

With live music and ‘color throwing’ every few hours, this event is even more colorful than Burning Man. I WANT to go! Who’s in for next year?

Brace yourselves: You’re about to have your pants charmed off by three teen girl superheroes in under 80 seconds, thanks to Super Best Friends Forever.

If the art looks familiar, that’s because animator Lauren Faust previously worked on series including The Powerpuff Girls and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and she’s brought that same fun touch to Wonder Girl, Batgirl and Supergirl. Super Best Friends Forever airs on the Cartoon Network as part of DC Nation — hopefully, future shorts will also get some sort of online distribution. Because this? This is GREAT.

When I first watched this post-apocalyptic animated short by Oddball Animation, I felt like Star Wars and Indiana Jones had a video game baby. I just couldn’t look away. Visually, it’s absolutely stunning. And it features bad ass motocycle maneuvers and cleverly executed explosions. Umm…awesome!

I’m going to begin with this: what you’re about to watch is running in real-time on a Playstation 3. Normally, that statement is a fanboy signal that this demonstration features graphics impressive enough to also convey doubt at whether or not they’re pre-rendered, Hollywood-style CGI. This time, the reason I’m stating that upfront is because what you’re about to see isn’t a video game, and doesn’t mean to be, but was born from the platform.

The history of storytelling in video games is…checkered. For every Uncharted and Mass Effect series, there are a litany of plots so thinly transparent that they rival the cellophane the game came in. But as with any emerging medium, the art comes from unexpected places. Video games’ own attempts at storytelling led to the birth of Machinima, for instance. A focus on the emotions brought about by gameplay itself birthed games like REZ and Flower. It’s a cycle destined to continue repeating itself that art begets technology which further begets art.

So what you’re about to see is a short story about the future – in so many different ways; the future of storytelling, the future of gaming, the future of machines, and even – potentially – the future of humanity.